Garden of Delight – Blessed Minutes 7” (Moonlight Productions, 1984)

What we have here is something much earlier, much more obscure, and from, of all places, Norway. Indeed, I must confess to having stumbled across them quite by accident on the net while looking for something entirely different.

Apparently one of the first Goth bands in Norway but beyond that, not much information is available here, and short of any native Norwegian speakers with an access to fanzines of the time, I doubt there ever will be.

Garden of Delight popped out two singles in 1984 of which “Blessed Minutes” and its B-Side “Glory”, appears to have been the first. It may not be the be all and end all of Goth, but I’ve certainly heard far worse. They clearly had a taste for nice Pornography-era Cure style instrumentation, but whether getting in session musicians to include a horns section on “Blessed Minutes” was a good idea remains debatable.

Despite its eccentric beginning and unusual lyrics (perhaps “glory to your broken leg” sounds slightly less daft in Norwegian?) “Glory” is a much stronger song, leaving one to speculate on why it was the B-Side? Stranger still, why make a video clip for the B side of a single? Meanwhile, the art work for the B-side certainly suggests the Norwegian music scene may have had a taste for blasphemy long before the Black Metal explosion of the early 90s.

By 1987 Garden of Delight had apparently shed the Goth trappings, releasing their only full length album Big Wheels in Emotion (Pale Records) which I can’t claim to have heard, but the cover art certainly doesn’t inspire confidence. Nor does the fact that no one seems to have uploaded any tracks from it onto Youtube, or that the band seems to have vanished into the void of obscurity shortly thereafter.

Rather more interesting though is Garden of Delight’s second single "22 Faces" (Moonlight Productions, 1984), not so much for its quality, it is in fact a substantially wimpier beast than its predecessor, as for The Strange Tale of The Riff That Wouldn't Die.

Does that sound familiar?

It should, because it’s extremely close to the riff used by Nirvana on their 1991 single “Come as You Are”. Yes! That riff! The one Killing Joke threatened to sue them for ripping off their 1985 song “Eighties”. A threat of legal action that must have taken considerable chutzpah, considering that not only did Garden of Delight beat Killing Joke to it by a year, but also, that the riff seems to have originally come from the 1982 song “Life Goes On” by The Damned, who so far have been very nice indeed in not threatening to sue anyone.

Youtube does also seem to have a couple of tracks from Garden of Delight's 1983 demo which for the sake of completeness we may as well include.

I stumbled on your blog while snooping around the internet for information about the similar riffs in the Nirvana/Killing Joke/Damned songs, only to find out there are more songs involved than three.

I hope you won`t mind that I borrowed your "The Strange Tale of The Riff That Wouldn't Die" phrase as a title for a relevant post on my blog:http://theunderestimator.tumblr.com/post/61572820671/the-strange-tale-of-the-riff-that-wouldnt-die.

A Welcome and Introduction

Plunder the Tombs was started back in 2010 by way of looking back on a musical past that I felt in sore need of curation.

It was a strange and sad time when what passed for “Goth” in clubs seemed a pale imitator of what once was, following first a decade of cookie-cutter Sisters of the Nephilim clone bands and then another decade of industrial dance being palmed off to younger audiences as a type of faux goth. When on rare occasion DJs in “Goth” clubs did finally become brave enough to play something like Bauhaus it was not untypical to have the dance floor clear, and it became obvious that the memory, meaning and legacy of much that had gone before had been lost.

It’s probably safe to say that the boundaries of what was “Goth” were never clearly defined. An absolute blessing for those bands on the original scene before it had a name pinned to the donkey, but an outright curse for those who came later and found rules had been imposed to dictate that which was and that which was not acceptable. Worse still was to come in the 90s from a lazy and unquestioning media who simply assumed that anything that wore black and make up was by definition “Goth”, thus allowing all manner of pretenders licence, and maximising confusion as to what the term actually referred to.

This has gone on for way too long and its time is at an end. Neo Post-Punk bands now proliferate across Europe, old long dead Goth bands rise from their crypts in the UK, and new deathrock bands are breeding like rabbits up the west coast of America. It is time to reclaim our scene back from metal bands and ravers in disguise.

While the Plunder the Tombs of old focused on what had gone before, there are now far too many exciting new things to ignore. We roar back to life in a reboot, covering past , present and things yet to come.

Let us plunder the tombs….

About Me

A DJ throughout the 90s at numerous Goth night clubs in Perth including The Cell, Dominion and others he was probably far too drunk to remember, largely as a result of his preference to work for bar tabs over cash. Also helped found 6RTR fm's Goth & Industrial showcase Darkwings.
More recent projects include the currently dormant Descent - a small night dedicated to playing genuinely good Goth music both old and new in preference to packing the dance floor with songs everyone had heard 20 million times before. He currently runs a monthly show on Behind the Mirror on 6RTR fm which can be heard on Wednesdays at 11pm WST.
Rumour has it he once masterminded an ill-advised Goth fanzine "Small Pleasures" that in retrospect, he remains profoundly grateful never made it off his desk.